Open AccessThe critical role of structural hole in forming trust for Securing Wireless Sensor Networks
Author(s) -
Ming Xiang,
William Liu,
Quan Bai,
Adnan Al-Anbuky
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
international journal of information, communication technology and applications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2205-0930
DOI - 10.17972/ijicta20162127
Subject(s) - wireless sensor network , computer science , reputation , routing (electronic design automation) , computer network , computational trust , wireless network , computer security , wireless , telecommunications , social science , sociology
The security issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are crucial and the limitation of computing resources and distributed properties of WSN make the traditional security mechanisms no longer feasible in protecting WSN as in the wired networks. There is an emerging research area i.e., trust and reputation mechanisms, has been developed, as an alternative solution to tackle the security issues in WSNs. While the recent studies on trust are mainly focusing on the trust modelling so as to effectively detect and avoid malicious activities. In this paper, we propose to use adaptive network approach to investigate the interplay between the network entities' trust behaviour and their underlying topological connectivity. We have found that the structural hole has its unique position and efficiency on connecting different regional sub-networks, but on the other side, from the security perspective, it has risks of fragile in the network. The extensive simulation studies have confirmed that structure hole plays a critical role on both for securing WSNs and also enable network routing efficiency.